Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

From April 22--26, Michael Nelson and I attended International Internet Preservation Consortium ( IIPC ) General Assembly 2013 that was hosted by the National and University Library of Slovenia in Ljbuljana, Slovenia. This year is the ten-year anniversary of the IIPC. GA this year has the theme of " What were the past challenges? and how can we plan the future of IIPC? ". Also, this year, Old Dominion University becomes an official member of the IIPC. The GA has been organized into five days. Day 1: Monday, April 22, 2013 IIPC General Assembly . Mateja Komel Snoj, the director of the National and University Library Slovenia , and Alenka Kavčič – Čolić, the Head of Library Research Center at National and University Library Slovenia opened the days welcomed the attendance and showed their pleasure for hosting IIPC GA in Slovenia. Mateja emphasized the importance of the digital preservation and the rule of National and University Library Slovenia in the preservation o

(note: Carbon Date 2.0 was released on 2014-11-14 ) In the course of our research we often needed to determine when a certain web resource was created. In numerous cases, this question is fairly straightforward to answer by examining the resource itself. Articles often have publishing datetime stamps, social media contributions have posting time, and others you can estimate the creation date from reading the resource itself. This process is simple upon manually examining the resource, but when the dataset of resources is large it is harder to automate. To solve this problem we conducted several experiments to determine when the resource was created automatically. When a resource is created it often gets indexed in the search engines, archived in the public archives, and shared in the social media thus leaving trails of existence. We trace those trails of existence and use the first appearance of the first trail as a close estimate of the creation date. The timeline below illustra

On April 5-6, I was pleased to have the opportunity to meet and network with many successful senior women as well as graduate students from other universities in CRA-W Graduate Cohort , which was held in Boston, MA. Grad Cohort, which began in 2004, aims to increase the ranks of senior women in computing by building and mentoring nationwide communities of women through their graduate studies. Grad Cohort accepts women students in their first, second, or third year of graduate school in computer science and engineering. They provide sessions for each of the three years. Since I am now in my third year of my computer science Ph.D., I attended third year sessions, which I'm going to talk about in the rest of the blog post. The workshop included a mix of formal presentations and informal discussions. In the first day's afternoon, there was a Poster Session for participants to talk about their research. I presented a poster entitled " Access Patterns for Robots and Humans

 On March 21 & 22 members of the ResourceSync technical group met in Ann Arbor Michigan to work the 0.5 version of the ResourceSync specification .  In case you're not familiar, ResourceSync is a framework, intended to replace OAI-PMH , for specifying how a destination ("harvester" in PMH terms) can synchronize the web resources of a source ("repository" in PMH terms).  The source publishes a list of resources that it makes available via ResourceSync (which may be a subset of valid resources at the web site) using Sitemaps , with the idea that if you're already using Sitemaps then you are already minimally compliant, and the more advanced features of ResourceSync also use the Sitemap syntax for consistency.  Although the syntactic details are in flux, Herbert's presentation at the September 2012 NISO Forum is a good introduction the framework, as are the two recent D-Lib Magazine articles ( Sept/Oct 2012 and Jan/Feb 2013 ).  Some important

At the ResourceSync meeting this week, Simeon Warner brought my attention to the fact that the NASA Technical Report Server (NTRS) digital library had gone offline on March 19.  Although I have not been involved with it since about 2004, I was the creator of NTRS and it was a central part of my early career .  If you click on http://ntrs.nasa.gov/ now, you can a message saying the service is down.  Technically, you get an "HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" message: $ curl -I http://ntrs.nasa.gov/ HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable Date: Sat, 23 Mar 2013 04:00:14 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) Last-Modified: Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:50:02 GMT ETag: "720003-300-4d882e4c05280" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 768 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8  And the body of the page says: The NASA technical reports server will be unavailable for public access while the agency conducts a review of the site's conten

The NFL salary cap for 2013 has been calculated to be about $123 million. All NFL teams must be in compliance with the salary cap by March 12th when the new league year starts. March 12th also marks the start of the free agent market in the NFL. Teams that are over the salary cap must let some players go and teams that are under the salary cap are looking to add new players to their rosters. The process sounds simple on the surface but in reality it becomes confusing rather quickly. Many teams routinely exceed the salary cap by manipulating contracts. The Pittsburgh Steelers were about $14 million over the cap until they modified Ben Roethlisberger's contract and changed most of his pay into a signing bonus. Signing bonuses can be amortized over the life of a contract. Instead of receiving an $18 million dollar salary, the player gets a $2 million dollar salary and a $16 million dollar bonus. The bonus will be divided by the number of years in the contract and thus reduce the i

On February 21-22 Justin Brunelle ( @justinfbrunelle ) and I ( @machawk1 ) traveled to College Park, Maryland for Personal Digital Archiving (PDA) 2013 . Other members of the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research (WS-DL) Group at ODU had previously attended this conference (see 2012 Trip Report and 2011 Trip Report ), always previously at Internet Archive in San Francisco , and knew it would be informative and extremely relevant to both of research efforts. We had both been anticipating a few of the presentations, namely the keynotes by Sally Bedell Smith and George Sanger and that Erin Engle ( @erinengle ) promised on the Library of Congress digital preservation blog The Signal . For the sake of preservation, I captured videos of many of the presentations , which I posted on Internet Archive. Each available will be linked inline in this post but for a more original experience, view the videos. As our sole mission at WS-DL is not only to document conferences (ok, admit